Female surgeons have slightly better outcomes

[Adelaide]

Patients of female surgeons did slightly better following surgery than those whose surgeons were male, according to a Canadian study published in a British medical journal.

The BMJ study compared outcomes for patients undergoing one of 25 surgical operations by female surgeons with patients undergoing the same procedures by male surgeons. The doctors were the same age, with similar levels of experience. A total of 104,630 patients were treated by 3,314 surgeons over the study period. All patients came from hospitals in Ontario.

Patients treated by female surgeons were four per cent less likely to die in the 30 days after an operation, says Dr. Raj Satkunasivam, a Canadian and a surgeon at Houston Methodist Hospital in Texas. Satkunasivam was the lead author of the study...


The study is observational, meaning the researchers can't establish causes for the differing outcomes. But co-author Dr. Chris Wallis, a urology resident at Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre, has a theory.

"Female physicians tend to communicate better than men. They also tend to follow guidelines more closely than men do in medicine in general. It's possible that those differences in the way that men and women interact with patients, interact with their colleagues, may also contribute to the differences that we're seeing in this study," he says.

Patients of female surgeons have slight better outcome, study finds - CBC news

The proposed reasoning (possible) behind the slightly better outcomes is kind of interesting.

[Kacper]

If there were no differences related to complications and readmissions, then I think this is just a statistical fluke.

[Kalkin]

No surprise. Women are naturally more nurturing. I'd be willing to bet men have better outcomes in construction.

[Captain Obvious]

As a rule women are NOT good orthopedic surgeons.

A total hip replacement requires a lot of upper body strength to twist the patient into a pretzel basically.

[Trumpster]

There's not enough information as to how the study was conducted. For example, were all the patients female? It doesn't say.

Are male surgeons more adventurous and therefore open to taking riskier cases which are likely to have higher failure rates?

[Peter1469]

With my last major surgery, the doc was female. But the surgery was doctor assisted. She told me it did a better job than she could have. She was disappointed out about it.